Deeper (26 page)

Another wave
slapped against the side of the
Isabella
and staggered me.
 
If I'd been standing
up, I'd have kissed the deck.
 
Instead, I
just fell on my side and let out a groan.
 
I got off the bed and headed for the main deck.
 
I couldn’t sit still:
 
there was too much going on in my head.
 
Mind you, walking was a bit of a challenge,
too, with the way the waves were knocking us around.
 
The main cabin was filled with more people
that I'd expected to see.
 
Of course the
college kids were there because they couldn’t very well go back down in this
storm.
 
It had nothing to do with the
waters near the
cave,
those were deep enough to avoid
any real impact from the waves.
 
It had
to do with getting away from the
Isabella
without getting smashed by the yacht.

Most of them
were looking a little green around the edges.
 
Seasickness, most likely.
 
It's one thing to dive and another to deal
with the constant motion of a violent sea.
 
I walked over to the medical supplies without even thinking about it and
laid out two packages of Dramamine.
 
Several faces made grateful expressions as they reached for the stuff.

Martin Ward
was in a heated conversation with Charlie and Jacob and I could guess what the
source of the debate was.

"I didn't
say you couldn't have the Deep One back.
 
I said it was a shame to have to let it go."
 
Ward saw me coming and his tone changed from
angry to conciliatory.
 
I could see that
both Jacob and Charlie were taken aback by the sudden change in tone.
 
Charlie glanced in my direction and I saw
understanding move over his features.

Ward was
scared of me.
 
That was a good thing.

Jacob took
advantage of his friend's change of demeanor and jumped on it like a predator
at the first sign of weakness.
 
"Glad to see you coming around, Martin.
 
We can try again for one of the Deep Ones if
you like, but I think the important thing to remember here is that we're
dealing with sentient creatures.
 
They
can speak and reason and as we've just unfortunately learned, they can
retaliate."
 
Even as he spoke he
pulled out a pack of cigarettes and tossed it to me.
 
I was definitely going to have to buy him a
carton or two.

All three men
looked at me, and I knew they were waiting to see how I would respond to Ward's
sudden offer of sacrifice.
 
I know how
much this fish man meant to him.
 
I
understood the scientific significance it offered to the world at large.
 
I knew that the doctor would be able to write
his own checks when it came to future research.
 
I nodded my thanks and headed past them and into the hold of the yacht.

There was
something I had to find that would make this whole thing much easier for the
doctor to swallow.
 
I've been in business
for a long time and I know just about every trick there is to catching a big
fish.
 
Some of them aren't very sporting
but they're not always illegal.
 
If a
rich man wants to cheat to catch a bluefish, who am I to stop him?
 
It's his money and his vacation.
 
I won't let anyone blatantly break the law on
my yacht, but a little leeway is a plus if you ever want to have repeat
business.

One of my
regular clients every year was a man named Oliver Townsby.
 
I have no idea what he does for a living and
I don't care.
 
What I cared about right then
was that the oversized, middle-aged man who liked to date girls who were barely
out of high school was a guarantee of two week's worth of work, that he tipped
handsomely, and that half the time he left behind whatever gadgets he'd brought
with him.
 
I left them on the
Isabella
for two reasons:
 
first, you never know when you might have a
use for some of the gadgets; and, second, the man had a mind that was
unbelievably sharp and had, from time to time, brought up the stuff he'd left
behind.
 
It was like he was testing me to
see if I was honest.
 
I was, and the end
result one year was a five-hundred-dollar tip when I gave him back a fifty-dollar
piece of electronic junk he swore worked to increase his fish haul.

I pushed past
a few boxes worth of leftovers from fishing trips gone by and finally found
what I was looking for after finishing off the first of my cigarettes.
 
The whole thing was awkward as hell, but only
because it was still in the box.
 
I think
Townsby used it once and then decided it was too much of a waste of time with
all the dials and knobs.

They were
still talking when I came back out and all three men looked at me as I carried
out the box.
 
Charlie chuckled and Jacob
looked puzzled.
 
Ward looked unimpressed
until he read the fine print.

The wonders of
modern technology never cease to amuse me.
 
Townsby had spent a fortune on the thing in my arms and couldn't have
cared less after it started to bore him.
 
Ward looked at it like it was the holy grail of fishermen's tools and
actually smiled for the first time in days.
 
That didn't make me like him any more, but it stopped me from wanting to
hurt him.

It was a
global positioning tracker, state of the art two years ago and still a couple
of thousand dollars on the market.
 
The
GPS unit wasn't what made it special.
 
What made it something to notice was the fact that it was designed
specifically for tracking larger fish in the water.
 
Good up to fifteen atmospheres according to
the box and with an effective range of two hundred miles.
 
The transmitter was supposed to be delivered
with a dart from a speargun.
 
Just to
make sure no one got it wrong they even included the gas-powered device that
was half the size of the ones on the
Isabella
.
 
I opened the case and showed Ward the
specifics.
 
He picked up on it quickly
enough.

"When we
get back to the docks, all you have to do is stick that thing in the back and
let it go.
 
You'll get to keep track of
your frog man.
 
I'll get my wife back in
one piece."

That was as
close as I could come to a peace offering.
 
He accepted it gratefully.

Now all I had
to do was wait out the storm, which by the way the
Isabella
was rocking, seemed to be getting worse.
 
Either that, or Davey was doing a crappy job
of facing into the waves.
 
I went to see
how he was doing while Ward and Charlie discussed the best way to set the whole
thing into action.

Davey wasn't
on the bridge.
 
He should have been.
 
The door was open and the rain was spilling
across the deck, sloshing back and forth with the surge of the waves.
 
The radio was on, the sonar was going, and
everything was where it should have been, except for Davey.

Like I needed any more complications.
 
Maybe he'd gone to the head and forgotten to
mention it to anyone.
 
I didn't want to
panic until I knew there was a reason to get worried.
 
So I walked onto the bridge instead and went
to see what was going on.

The sonar was
completely clear and I froze as soon as I noticed that.
 
The sonar shouldn't have been clear, you
see.
 
What is should have been was very
busily pointing out that the Devil's Reef was less than three hundred feet away
on the right.
 
It should also, maybe,
have been letting us know that Golden Cove was off to the left and behind us.

I checked the
readings twice, made absolutely sure that there was no mistake, and then I
started panicking.
 
Who knew how long
we'd been away from where we were supposed to be?
 
I had no clue.
 
I only knew that we were adrift, and at least
a mile or so away from where we had been anchored.

Davey was
missing and we were out in the middle of the ocean in one hell of a storm.
 
And while the fish man hadn't given me a time
limit for getting his friend back to him, I didn't like Belle's odds if I
couldn’t get her away from the underwater demons sometime in the very near
future.

*
         
*
         
*
         
*
         
*

I couldn’t
change much about what was happening until after the storm finished with
us.
 
The only good thing I had going for
me was that the sonar wasn't warning me about a really big rock, or maybe an
oil tanker, that would break the
Isabella
into kindling.
 
I took a look at the
surrounding waters and then I got busy with a little creative steering.
 
The waves were just as fearsome as I was
afraid they'd be and it took a lot of concentration to maneuver the yacht
through the worst of them.

I guess a few
of the passengers must have started getting a little worried because Charlie
came along and checked to see what was up.
 
Nothing good was the answer and after a few minutes explaining
everything, he went off to find Davey.

It wasn't
looking good.
 
I probably already said
that, but it bears repeating.
 
Time sort
of played with my head for a while.
 
I
didn't have the energy to focus on anything but steering the
Isabella
through the storm.
 
I know that Charlie told me Davey wasn't on
board, but I couldn't afford to leave the ship floundering and go looking for
him.
 
I was far too busy trying to
outsmart the waves that seemed to want me dead.

Did I do well
?
  
My only answer to
that:
 
I'm here now and writing
this.
 
The
Isabella
took a beating, but aside from Davey, no one was lost
during that storm.
 
We took on water, but
there are pumps designed to take care of that sort of problem and they
worked.
 
We had a few pieces of furniture
go sliding, but none of the big stuff and the worst that happened was one of
the college kids got a bruise on his shin from a runaway chair.

So, yes, I
think I did all right.
 
No one died and
the yacht didn't settle down with a new address under the sea.

On the other
hand, Davey was missing.
 
Our Davey, my
Davey; the kid I'd taken on because he loved the sea and was good with
machines.
 
The sun was gone, lost behind
the clouds and I was nowhere near Golden Cove as far as I could tell.

Somewhere
between Golden Cove and my unknown location, I'd lost a crew member.
 
The tough part would be finding him again.

*
         
*
         
*
         
*
         
*

First thing
you learn when it comes to sailing or working a boat is to know where you
are.
 
I'd gotten cocky.
 
I hadn't actually bothered to check latitude
and longitude when I took us to Golden Cove.
 
I'd eyeballed it.
 
So it took a
while to figure out where we were.
 
We'd
been washed around four miles off course.
 
Happily, there weren’t any other reefs hiding just under the water to
break the
Isabella
in half.

I tried to
radio the Coast Guard and got no response.
 
It had been a bad storm and there was always the chance the transmitter
had been knocked off.
 
In the dark there
wasn't a whole lot I could do about that, so we were on our own.
 
What, because I needed more reasons for the
tightness in my chest and the pain in the pit of my stomach?
 
I was having trouble catching a decent
breath, and I knew why.
 
There's only so
much you can take at one time and I was fast approaching my personal limit.
 
The idea was to make myself look calm for
everyone else.

It's easier to
get dragged out to sea with an anchor in the water than you might think.
 
Anchors only work as long as they stay stuck
to the bottom of the seabed, and in the case of Golden Cove, the land drops
away very abruptly.
 
As I understand it,
and I have to be honest and say I haven't really examined the notion too
carefully, the Devil's Reef is right at the edge of the continental shelf.
 
So it wasn't very hard to get lifted up by a
big wave and suddenly discover that the bottom had literally dropped out from
under the
Isabella
.

The end result
was a long stretch of ocean where a person could have fallen from the boat and
wound up damned near anywhere.
 
It wasn't
a soothing thought.
 
I'd lost my wife
only a few hours earlier and now Davey.
 
Much as I wanted to find Belle, I felt obligated to take it slowly on
the way back to the cove.
 
Not that it
did any good.
 
I looked, and so did
everyone else on board.
 
We searched
carefully, using the spotlights that adorned the yacht.
 
There was nothing to see but water.
 
The storm was gone and the ocean was almost
as calm as glass, as if recovering from the rough workout brought on by the
earlier weather.